It…she…it…it….she told me to stand…where it pointed….and ….Man, I don’t know why I fucking went over there man but I did and it…she…she pulled..my insides out…I felt ripped apart… like there was no coming back, I was dead and gone… Man, I didn’t even see a weapon, one second she was standing with her hands out, the next, I was screaming, I can’t…I can’t even go back there man….you can’t make me go back. I don’t know what happened to Ron, but fuck it man, fuck it.

I feel different, I can’t….really explain, it’s like I’m not allowed to know what’s happening…

…why are you looking at me like that man? …dude…DUDE! calm down! I’m not trying to HURT you! MAN!

“I’ll let you fuck me if you steal a pack of smokes and some chips” She said.

I didn’t move.

She was the most popular girl in school, and thank god we go to school, we had to do a project together for midterm and she showed up at my house and now what the FUCK did she just say..?”

I couldn’t move.

She isn’t even looking at me, its like that didn’t even just happen.

“…well..?”
She says it so rudely.
My initial shock is wearing off.
I fast-forward into the futureland and see what could occur.
Of course, I had known all along that she was just another enemy spy sent by them…but I always have hope…you never know where you might find an ally.
“You have to go.” I say.

I turn around and leave. It’s better not to kill them if you can avoid it.

As she put the old, time-stained kettle on the stove, her throat swelled shut & another wave of heat filled her where gills should have been.

She had dreams of being a fish.
She never cared to wonder where the dreams came from, they just did.

Like her husband.

The fishwoman never had a certain direction, and always ended up caught in a thick, rough straw net. It never bothered her, not even when they would filet her alive and leave her wet & bleeding life… rent upon their decks.

Nothing ever seemed to bother her, asleep or awake, she just kept swimming.
But her blood boiled & bubbled underneath the skin, causing bends where thoughts should have been.

I first saw her in a downtown bar, but she wasn’t typical.
I was sitting in a corner…trying harder to look like a struggling writer in a bar than actually trying to write. I looked up to survey if anyone had noticed me, and instead I noticed her.

She had cold air hooked into her like a fog machine, and she ordered two shots of tequila, an american beer, and downed all three as if she was on stage at a talent show.

She paid in crumpled cash and rattled change, twisting and stomping out of the place like a bass note.

As soon as she left, I felt her absence choking me. I pushed my papers together, fumbled with my worn leather wallet, threw way more than enough money down and blundered after her…elephants chasing moths.

She was a mote in the distance, the tracks framing her perfectly in my memory.
I tried to catch up, but I knew there was no catching her.
You either ran on her time or not at all.

“There was a time…there was a time…there was a time…”
The words echoed and repeated infinitely, digging into the veins of the space and inhabiting the air like thick tar.His face pulls at itself, a tic beginning in the neck, distorting the skin & opening the mouth into a half-snarl, teeth flashing briefly. The intensity causes an arm to raise, fingers reduced to grotesque, disproportionate claws.

He could see the birth of the universe.
The golden threads, the shifting diamonds, the colors that lit his skin on fire.
He was awake for the first time in millennia.

As he lay dying on the sidewalk, a child watches him from inside her mother’s apartment, eating ice cream & dreaming about the snow.

They smelled the air carefully.
The scales had tipped and he had done it, he had finally done it.

They eyed him with curiosity and patience as he fell, gasping and retching against the brick of the alleyway. His arms still continued to thrum with energy, although now there was a dull ache forming in the wrist. Desperately scraping nail-and-skin against stone, he drags his screaming neurons further from the body laying in all manners of fluid behind him.

Shuddering & spasming, he turns the corner…never once aware of his surroundings. They pull him down to the ground like magnets on iron.
Wrapping long, slender, inhuman fingers around his body.
His skin is melting, blisterless, wet & putrid.